§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

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Friday, December 20, 2013

ObamaCare: An Assault By The Left-Wing Minority

Clearly ObamaCare was not something designed for all the people and desired by a majority of citizens. The White House’s rear-guard PR defense implicitly acknowledges that fact, in the process of distorting the facts:

“The benefits of the healthcare law are real, and the repeal plan pushed by Republicans in Congress would undermine or eliminate them across the board, reversing critical consumer protections and driving up costs for millions of Americans,” the White House said in a statement (quoted from the Fiscal Times website).

Briefly, in keeping with Darwinian evolutionary doctrine and prevailing liberal-progressive ideas of the day, Wilson believed that Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, and members of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were altogether wrong in their emphasis upon individual rights (see Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, by Ronald J. Pestritto). The need was for greater concentration of power and increased administrative efficiency in the Federal government, which necessarily meant diminishing individual rights.

Since the founding era, Wilson asserted, Hegelian historical forces had created a new society. The United States had come together into a unified whole in which there were no longer the individualistic competing interests among political and economic factions. The founders’ Constitutional checks and balances, particularly states rights under the Bill of Rights’ Tenth Amendment, had in the 20th century become impediments to government’s administrative efficiency. Needed was a clear field for liberal-progressive administrative experts to implement new political and economic policies as they saw fit, without interference from Congress.

During his academic career, and before becoming governor of New Jersey and president of the United States, Wilson had advocated appointing all Federal cabinet ministers from among members of Congress, in the British parliamentary fashion. Such ministers, Wilson thought, would both be able to influence public sentiment, and able to hammer out policy measures during active participation in the legislative process. Congress, in British Parliamentary fashion, would become the dominant branch of government. Combining it with the presidency would enable government leaders to do almost anything they believed necessary to add to “efficiency” in controlling the populace. [ObamaCare is hardly an example of the superior efficiency that liberal-progressives attribute to collectivized, socialized Federal power]

This, of course, was in diametric opposition to the hard-won experience of the founders who wrote the Constitution. As Madison and Hamilton wrote extensively in the Federalist papers, individual rights of all varieties, especially property rights, would be too vulnerable to mob sentiment, to the tyranny of the majority, without multiple checks and balances to prevent concentration of too much political power in one person or group.

After gaining political office, Wilson changed his views somewhat. The drive toward augmented administrative efficiency remained, but Wilson began to realize that the most practical route toward that goal was bolstering the powers of the presidency. To that end, during his presidency, Wilson added many governmental regulatory agencies and bolstered their regulatory power to impose de facto law via issuance of regulations without Congressional review. Among the most consequential of these agencies was the Federal Reserve System, established in 1913. Today’s arbitrary regulations by the EPA, for example, are Wilson’s progeny.

A key element in Wilson’s view of the presidency was public opinion. On the one hand, Wilson theorized that the process of history, a “thing in itself” in Hegelian terms, had reshaped and unified American social and economic opinion. On the other hand, Wilson believed that only elite, liberal-progressive leaders were capable of understanding and interpreting that new opinion to the general public. [President Obama obviously subscribes to this view]

Wilson’s elitist attitude underlies our present-day, we-know-what’s-best-for-you nanny state, exemplified in President Obama’s and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s imposition in 2010 of socialized healthcare legislation (Obamacare ) over the strong objections of a majority of voters.